MODERN LIVING: Do It Yourself

In San Francisco two years ago, Richard Perkins, an architect’s assistant, and his wife Lois, a newspaperwoman, found a way to lick the high cost of a house. They set to work to build their own, although neither had ever done much manual work before. They bought a hillside lot in suburban Tamalpais Valley and pulled on blue overalls. Working nights and weekends, they wheeled in 32 tons of gravel for the foundation, spent 13 weekends raising the framing. Eight months later, they moved into their small, modern redwood home. For their $5,000 in cash, plus their “sweat equity,” the Perkinses had a house easily worth $10,000. In San Francisco’s Paradise Cove, Architect Henry Schubart Jr. and his wife are doing even better, so far have finished $25,000 worth of new house for $12,000 in odd hours over three years.

Their experiments are far from exceptional. All over the U.S., thousands of couples are building or finishing their own homes; thousands more are remodeling their old ones. Partly, their activity is a new expression of the old American passion for working with their hands; it has sent the sales of power saws, sanders, drills, spray guns, and all power tools soaring. But mainly, the “build-it-yourself” boom is born of economic necessity. Not only has the oldtime handyman all but disappeared, but hired home builders or repairers are sometimes shoddy workmen, and always high-priced. Said a Chicago lumber dealer: “It’s a simple economic fact that a $75-a-week bookkeeper can’t buy the services of a $150 carpenter.”

Faucet Bars. “Build-it-yourself” is already a booming business. Those who were quick to detect it have cashed in. Black & Decker, one of the first power toolmakers to go after the amateur market, has boosted sales from $17 million to $30 million in five years. Brooklyn’s David E. Kennedy Inc. (Kentile), which advertises the fact that a housewife can install a new kitchen floor, is now the biggest U.S. seller of asphalt tiles. Sales of all such asphalt tiles have risen in a decade from about 90 million sq. ft. to an estimated 550 million, of which one-third is now bought directly by the home owner. Do-it-yourself has brought similar gains, and market shifts, to other industries. Retail lumber sales have risen from $1.2 billion to $4.3 billion, with much of the increase due to purchases by home workers. Since 1946, the amount of plywood sold to non-professional builders has almost doubled (in 1951 it was 10% of total output); manufacturers are encouraging such trade by making a variety of ready-to-use panels in small handy sizes.

Nearly two-thirds of all wallpaper is now going up without the benefit of skilled paperhangers. The new ready-pasted, pre-trimmed papers have only to be moistened and applied. Of all paint sold, about 75% is put on by amateurs, who find that the new-type paints (TIME, Dec. 17) make professional jobs easy. Sears, Roebuck is encouraging home-linoleum-laying by offering complete kits (at 98¢) containing curved cutting knife, cement spreader, etc. Sears and many other stores sell detailed plans on how to build everything from a lawn chair to a house. Master plumbers, tired of being denounced for sending two men to fix one leaky faucet, are now setting up “faucet bars,” where the householder may bring his own in to be fixed, quicker and cheaper. In Oradell, N.J., one farsighted plumber is earning good will (and future business) by holding classes where housewives can learn to make their own minor repairs. The new building craze has revived some of the customs of pioneer “barn-raising” days. One Detroiter built his own seven-room ranch house with the labor of friends, who helped him on weekends.

Happy Hunters. Lumbermen, who once sold chiefly to carpenters and contractors, have found their yards overrun with eager amateurs. Grossman’s in Boston gives its customers free use of power tools to cut lumber to length, rents them other tools to take home, provides ski racks for their cars to haul supplies. Since war’s end, Grossman’s has sold the plans and materials for 3,000 new owner-built homes, financed them for as little as $29 a month. In Washington, ex-House-Wrecker Sidney Hechinger has built a $4,000,000-a-year business on the same lines. Hechinger carries 100,000 different items in hardware, plumbing fixtures, gutters (the pieces can be joint-fitted without soldering), tools, tiles, paint. He puts on a school for outdoor cooks, with a professional chef broiling steaks while a bricklayer demonstrates how to build your own outdoor fireplace.

In Chicago, two of the biggest lumberyards—Hines’s and Harvey’s—both have weekly TV shows featuring how-to-build demonstrations. Harvey’s even stays open on Sundays (10 to 2) for the convenience of weekend builders.